Investigations Editor, The Age

Andrew Chan is one of 111 prisoners in Indonesia on death row. Photo: Danny Arcadia

Indonesia on Friday executed its first death row prisoner in five years, when seven ordinary prisoners bookended the deaths of the Bali bombers.

The news will cause dismay to Australian Bali Nine drug smugglers Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, and their lawyers, who lodged applications for clemency nine months ago with the Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

The surprise execution, which was announced publicly late on Friday, hours after the event, shattered the hope that public sentiment in Indonesia would prevent more deaths.

Until now, anti-death penalty advocates had hoped that the break since 2008 between executions indicated that Indonesia was now pursuing an unofficial moratorium on capital punishment.

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But at dawn on Friday, a Nigerian drug smuggler, Adami Wilson Bin Adam, aka Abu, was taken to one of the “thousand islands” off the coast of Jakarta, had a target hung around his neck, and was killed by firing squad.

An Attorney-General’s office spokesperson Setia Untung Arimuladi said Adam was a former police intelligence officer from Nigeria who had been caught in 2003 transporting one kilogram of heroin.

Sukumaran and Chan were arrested and jailed in 2005 after helping organise a shipment of 8.3 kilograms of heroin.

Supporters of the death penalty in Indonesia, led by Attorney-General Basrief Arief, began 2013 with strong statements that 10 prisoners would be executed this year because they had exhausted all legal avenues of appeal, including failing in their bid for clemency with Mr Yudhoyono.

Another 111 prisoners in Indonesia are, like the Australians, on death row, but with legal or political appeals pending.

The anti-death penalty lobby in Indonesia believed it had made some inroads last year when news emerged that Mr Yudhoyono had quietly granted clemency to five people on death row since 2004, including drug traffickers.

When that news came out about those grants of clemency, Indonesia’s urbane foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, commented pointedly that most of the world had now abolished capital punishment and Indonesia was now in a minority.

But the constituency for the death penalty in Indonesia, particularly among its police and security forces, as well as among Muslim groups, remains strong. Masdar Farid Mas’udi, the deputy chairman of the 30 million strong Islamic organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, wrote last year that, in the absence of remorse, “capital punishment is the best for [the criminal], for the people and for the state”.